/ "Harlem as a site of the black cultural sublime was invented by writers and artists determined to transform the stereotypical image of Negro Americans at the turn of the century away from their popular image as ex-slaves, as members of a race inherently inferior inferior - biologically and environmentally unfitted for mechanized modernity and its cosmopolitan forms of fluid identity - into an image of a race of cultural bearers. To effect this transformation, a 'New Negro' was called for - quite urgently, many black intellectuals felt- and this New Negro would need a nation over which to preside. And that nation's capital would be Harlem, that realm north of Central Park, centered between 130th Street and 145th."
"In a 1925 essay entitled 'The New Negro', Howard University Professor of Philosophy Alain Locke described this transformation as not relying on older time-worn models but, rather, embracing a 'new psychology' and 'new sprit'. Central to Locke's prescription was the mandate that the 'New Negro' had to 'smash' all of the racial, social and psychological impediments that had long obstructed black achievement. Six years prior to Locke's essay, the pioneering black film maker Oscar Micheaux called for similar changes. In his film Within our Gates, Micheaux represented a virtual cornucopia of 'New Negro' types: from the educated and entrepreneurial 'race' man and woman to the incorrigible Negro hustler, from the liberal white philanthropist to the hard core white racist. Micheaux created a complex, melodramatic narrative around these types in order to develop a morality tale of pride, prejudice, misanthropy and progressivism that would be revisited by Locke and others."
"This New Negro movement, which took at least three forms before Alain Locke enshrined it in the Harlem Renaissance in 1925, took its artistic inspiration from citizens across the Atlantic in Europe. First, in the early 1890s, Dvorák declared the spirituals to be America's first authentic contribution to world culture and urged classical composers to draw upon them to create sui generis symphonies. A decade later Pablo Picasso stumbled onto 'dusky Manikins' at an an ethnographic museum and forever transformed European art, as well as Europe's official appreciation of the art from the African continent. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon - the signature painting in the creation of Cubism - stands as a testament to the shaping influence of African sculpture and to the central role that African art played in the creation of modernism. The Cubist mask of modernism covers a black Bantu face. African art -ugly,primitive, debased in 1900; sublime, complex, valorized by 1910 - was transformed so dramatically in the cultural imagination of the West, in such an astonishingly short period, that potential for the political use of black art and literature in America could not escape the notice of African American intellectuals, especially Du Bois, himself himself educated in Europe and cosmopolitan to the core, and Alain Locke, Harvard-trained, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1906 and thereafter a student of aesthetics in Germany in the heady years of the modernist explosion. If European modernism was truly a mulatto, the argument went, then Africans Americans would save themselves politically through the creation of the arts. The Harlem Renaissance, in so many ways, owes its birth to Euro-African modernism in the visual arts. This Renaissance, the second in black history, would fully liberated the Negro - at least its advance guard."
Extracts from 'Harlem on our Minds' by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
'Re/Birth of a Nation' by Richard J. Powell
Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (London/California: Hayward Gallery, Institute of International Visual Arts and University of California Press, 1997).
Background image of 'Les Fetiches' by LoïsMailou Jones 1938
“The New Negro”: “When He’s Hit, He Hits Back!”
In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation’s Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the “New Negro.” Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin LyndeHartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was “new” in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.
[Editorial headnote in original: In this article Dr. Hartt has been at pains to avoid extremist arguments and scarehead testimony; he deals only with facts, presented from the moderate viewpoint of a Congregational minister who knows the various sections of the United States and has written for many years on American affairs. This article will be followed in an early issue by one which discusses the negro problem from the viewpoint of a Southerner.]
The other evening five hundred Knights of the Ku Klux Klan marched in procession thru Jacksonville, Florida—a “band of determined men,” who “would brook no interference.” Fifteen southern states now have Ku Klux organizations—their emblem, the “flaming cross”; their device, “We Stand for Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, Patriotism”; their advertisement, a shield bearing skull and cross-bones. Specimens of that advertisement, clipped from southern papers, are shown to visitors at the headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York City.
Southerners recall that during Reconstruction the South owed much to the Ku Klux, Northerners, however unsympathetic, find that it accomplished its purposes. Can it accomplish its purposes today, or is it perhaps destined to end by defeating them if not actually bringing about the very situation it aims to forestall? There are friends of the South who, having studied the evolution of the new negro, harbor serious misgivings. No mere fanciful bugaboo is the new negro. He exists. More than once I have met him. He differs radically from the timorous, docile negro of the past. Said a new negro, “Cap’n, you mark my words; the next time white folks pick on colored folks, something’s going to drop—dead white folks.” Within a week came race riots in Chicago, where negroes fought back with surprising audacity.
Another new negro, home from overseas said, “We were the first American regiment on the Rhine—Colonel Hayward’s, the Fighting Fifteenth; we fought for democracy, and we’re going to keep on fighting for democracy till we get our rights here at home. The black worm has turned.”
I said, “There is a high mortality among turning worms. We’ve got you people eight to one.”
He answered, “Don’t I know it? Thousands of us must die; but we’ll die fighting. Mow us down—slaughter us! It’s better than this.”
I remembered seeing a negro magazine shortly after the Chicago riots; a war-goddess on its cover brandished aloft her sword. “They who would be free,” ran the legend, “must themselves strike the blow.” I remembered a telegram from a negro editor, “Henceforward, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.” Here, in this colored veteran, was the same spirit—the spirit, that is, of the new negro. Hit, he hits back. In a succession of race riots, he has proved it. “When they taught the colored boys to fight,” says a negro paper, “they started something they won’t be able to stop.”
This is apparently no transient mood. The evolution of the new negro has been in progress since 1916, when southern negroes began to move North. That huge, leaderless exodus—a million strong, according to Herbert J. Seligmann, author of “The Negro Faces America”—stronger by far, according to some authorities—meant that for the first time in history the negro had taken his affairs into his own hands. Until then, things had been done to the negro, with the negro, and for the negro, but never by the negro. At last, he showed initiative and self-reliance. Despite the lure of big wages “up North,” it required no little courage. If the vanguard was exploited, the exploitation continued and still continues. In an article on “The High Cost of Being a Negro,” the Chicago Whip declares, “In Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Detroit, where negroes are working, they have to pay twice the rent, and in neighborhood clothing and grocery stores recent investigations show that for the same goods the negro has to pay a color tax sometimes as high as 50 per cent. Thus the net earnings, if any at all, are 50 per cent less than those of the white workers.” Yet the exodus from Dixie goes on. Few—astonishingly few—return.
“One reason for the migrations to the North,” says Dr. Hawk, a colored clergyman, “is that the negroes want independence. Planters give them two or three acres for themselves and furnish the plants and seeds and they pay with a certain per cent of their crop, but they have always been in debt for things they are compelled to buy at certain stores. Since the war, wages have been so high that they could free themselves from debt and go North. . . . The going of a negro causes great unrest among other negroes. . . . The exodus is not only among the poor or floating class; lynching has a lot to do with it.”
When the movement was just beginning, a white Southerner wrote in the Tifton Gazette: “The white people have only themselves to blame. They have allowed negroes to be lynched, five at a time, on no stronger ground than suspicion; they have allowed whole sections to be depopulated of them; they have allowed them to be white-capped and whipped and their homes burned, with only the weakest effort to apprehend or punish those guilty—when any effort was made at all.”
“The exodus is a great mark of progress,” thinks Dr. Hawk; “negroes are saying, ‘We can do this thing ourselves.’” They had not been doing it long when a new and still more tremendous influence came into play. America declared war. Negroes by scores of thousands joined the colors. Nor was that all. On the fourteenth of March, President Wilson “put the devil into the negro’s head,” as a southern newspaper phrases it, by receiving a deputation of colored clergy at the White House and making a speech thus reported in the negro press the country over:
"I have always known that the negro has been unjustly and unfairly dealt with; your people have exhibited a degree of loyalty and patriotism that should command the admiration of the whole nation. In the present conflict your race has rallied to the nation’s call, and if there has been any evidence of slackerism manifested by negroes, the same has not reached Washington.
Great principles of righteousness are won by hard fighting and they are attained by slow degrees. With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you